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A friend in D.C. with whom I was having a conversation remarked on the timing of our discourse with words to the effect of: “It’s a hot time in the old town tonight.” The headlines are definitely interesting: Benghazi, the IRS selective investigation of conservatives, plus a whole host of other issues — any of which would be front-page news by itself — are jockeying for a position above the fold.
It’s that crowded; almost like the planets were lining up. The ancients had a word for this kind of alignment of celestial objects: disaster – meaning “ill-starred.” The headlines look like The Onion on steroids:
“A Saudi man was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after federal agents said he lied about why he was traveling with a pressure cooker, according to a court documents filed Monday.” — Reuters.
“FBI surrounds house of Saudi student after sightings of him with pressure cooker pot.” — Daily Mail
Obama calls controversy over Benghazi talking points a “sideshow” — L.A. Times
“Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell found guilty of murdering three babies” — Chicago Tribune
“‘You don’t want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate,’ said President Obama.” — Politico.
The Onion, except they’re real.
And then there’s the big one about the wholesale seizure of an entire news agency’s phone records by the administration to find a leak:
The first question for White House spokesman Jay Carney at Tuesday's press briefing went right to the heart of the growing crisis facing President Obama:
In the matters of the Benghazi terror attack, the IRS targeting conservative groups, the Justice Department going after AP phone records, “…doesn’t responsibility for setting tone, setting direction ultimately rest with the president?”
That question of “where the buck stops” harkens back to another Democrat who occupied the Oval Office some 60 years ago, “Give ‘em Hell” Harry Truman but the answer is as relevant today.
Benghazi may not be "Obama's Watergate," as Sen. Lindsay Graham has called it, but what we have is an administration that is adrift and leaking more controversy and unanswered questions every day
Given the country's overcrowded prisons, the U.S. government begins to allow 12-hour periods of time in which all illegal activity is legal. During one of these free-for-alls, a family must protect themselves from a home invasion.
Is the dam on President Obama’s “most transparent administration in history” beginning to break? Now the brain-dead, low-information voters – to include Gregory Hicks, the Benghazi whistle-blower, who was also the #2 diplomat in Libya – are regretting their vote. Hicks himself voted for Clinton in the 2008 primary and twice for his highness the messiah Obama in the 2008 and 2012 general elections.
The low-information voters who have no job and appreciate the freebies that Obama provides them in return for their votes, are still fine and happy with the current trends in the good ole’ USA.
In 2010, we spoke and Democrats were voted out in big numbers but in 2012 we stupidly stayed at home and allowed this embarrassment of a president to be re-elected and insult the intelligence of Americans who actually care about our freedom. The country, which was once a proud nation and an arsenal of democracy today is embarrassed by an administration who is so corrupt it makes Cuba’s Castro regime look more accountable to its people.
The list of scandals already incredibly long but ignored by the media so far; the Acorn money laundering scandal from the Democratic Party operated by Obama and his community organizers, his numerous czars, his non-recess, recess appointments already outlawed by the courts and ignored by the Obama regime as well as the corrupt media.
Let’s not forget the food stamp scandal through which the government openly recruits illegal aliens (“undocumented immigrants” so as not to offend the PC police). Let us not forget the corrupt way that the “unaffordable” healthcare act, which was rammed through by the bribing of Democratic Senator Nelson of Nebraska and Democratic Senator Landrieu of Louisiana, along with an abuse of the budget reconciliation process to get it passed. Never mind that there was no time to read the bill but we had to pass it so we could find out what was in it.
We The People are being played for fools.
WENDELL GOLER: Jay, on the AP phone record, what prevents the president from picking up a phone, calling Eric Holder and asking him what happened?
JAY CARNEY: An enormous, a great deal preventing the president from doing that. It would be holy inappropriate for the president to involve himself in an investigation that, as Jessica points out at least as reported, involves leaks from the administration.
Fully electronic veterans’ benefits claims, a necessary ingredient for the Obama administration to fulfill its pledge to eliminate the claims backlog by the end of 2015, is showing only modest results in initial stages.
When Marion Bower decided to start her tea party organization in 2010, she didn’t know that it would take nearly two years for the Internal Revenue Service to approve her request for tax-exempt status. Continued...
A Democratic strategist emails:
The AP phone records thing just sealed the deal for what the newest narrative around the Obama administration is going to be. They are the new Nixon admin when it comes to bullying, withholding info and targeting enemies. The right won’t probably call him directly Nixon because you know, Nixon was a Republican, but it will be the basic idea. You will hear claims that there has never been an administration who reached so far to suppress information and dissent.
While I don’t think this is actually the full truth, it is hard to not realize this is fully the fault of the administration that perception has gotten to this point. They have a small window- I’d say 2-5 days- to try and turn this around and hold on to a plausible veneer of not being a group of shadowy thugs. But given how tone def they’ve been in the past, my money is on this being the lens through which their next 3.5 years are viewed.
Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.
According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.
Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.
FTA " WASHINGTON — More than two dozen African-American religious leaders and pro-lifers from across the country gathered here Tuesday to call on lawmakers to investigate the abortion industry and a reveal what they say is the mass murder of unborn black babies in poor minority communities. "
You heard it here first. You will never hear of it again.
News that the IRS targeted conservative groups for intense scrutiny is just one in a series of revelations pointing to a culture of expediency and intolerance in the Obama White House that corrupts this administration.
Consider the September slayings of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other U.S. diplomats in Benghazi. If the attack were revealed to be undertaken by terrorists, it posed a grave embarrassment to the president’s anti-terrorism strategy—eight weeks before the election.
On September 12, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs wrote in an email, “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
If your opponents are evil, anything goes.
Yet, just days later on the Sunday talk shows, UN Ambassador Susan Rice characterized the incident as the result of spontaneous street demonstrations inspired by an anti-Muhammad YouTube video.
Obama Care, having passed through the Senate on a slight-of-hand, has been contentious from the start, and the Congress has not appropriated as much funds as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would like to implement the law.
To do the work of HHS, she has sought large contributions from private health care companies to liberal non-profit groups. With health care so heavily regulated, it is hard to characterize these donations as voluntary.
No doubt, favors rendered will be returned, and it smacks of Chicago-style cronyism and corruption.
In his defense of President Obama, Press Secretary Jay Carney is beginning to sound a lot like Ronald Zeigler, Richard Nixon's spokesman. Carney only has to use the word "inoperative," as Ziegler did when incriminating evidence surfaced that proved his previous statements untrue.
Following what appears to be a cover-up in the Benghazi attack, the Washington Post has obtained documents from an audit conducted by the IRS's inspector general that indicate the agency targeted for special scrutiny conservative groups with "tea party" and "patriot" in their names, as well as "nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution."
IRS official Lois Lerner described the targeting efforts as "absolutely inappropriate," but said IRS actions were not driven by partisanship. How, then, would she explain why no groups with "progressive" in their titles were similarly targeted? Carney labeled Lerner an "appointee from the previous administration." In other words: Bush's mistake, not Obama's.
The Post's editorial board writes, "A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose." The board called for a full accounting. I doubt we'll get it. Take Benghazi.
